Value Commitments and the Balanced Life

Utilitas

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 24-45

  Tiberius, Valerie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

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EID: 85008525688     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820804001384     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. See, for example, Bernard Williams, 'Morality, the Peculiar Institution', Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London, 1985)
2. Bernard Williams and J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973)
3. Michael Stocker, 'The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories', Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976).
4. See, for example, Peter Railton, 'Alienation, Consequentialism and Morality', Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (1984)
5. and Marcia Baron, 'The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty', The Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984). Not all utilitarians have responded in this way. Elizabeth Ashford argues that utilitarianism does make objective integrity impossible in the current state of the world and that this is a virtue of utilitarianism. See her 'Utilitarianism, Integrity and Partiality', The Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000). I will say more about Ashford's position later.
6. For arguments that show the demandingness of morality see, for example, Peter Singer, 'Famine, Affluence and Morality', Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972) and Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (New York, 1996).
7. I begin with a prudentially virtuous agent, by which I mean an agent who has the virtues necessary for deliberating about and pursuing her own good. To begin with, a morally virtuous agent would be a mistake since it might beg the question of what a morally virtuous agent is against Kantians and utilitarians. Moreover, if we start from a position according to which traditional moral virtues are constitutive of a person's own good, we risk describing the good itself as a goal from which people are alienated.
8. I would argue that if we start with an unsophisticated view of prudence as preference satisfaction, for example, we end up with a conception of morality that is far too narrow. For this kind of strategy see David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford and New York, 1986). If, on the other hand, we start with an agent who is concerned to live a good life, where this is conceived as something non-moral, yet thicker than preference satisfaction, we will be better able to argue that anyone with an interest in living a worthwhile life from her own perspective will tend to be the kind of person who also lives well from the perspective of morality. For further work on this larger project see my 'Perspective: A Prudential Virtue', American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002).
9. Philippa Foot emphasizes the importance of the connection between virtue and the will in her 'Virtues and Vices', Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1978).
10. I would argue that all prudential virtues require a capacity for practical reflection and that this fact provides for a limited unity of the prudential virtues. For a defence of a limited unity of the moral virtues see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999), pp. 153-7.
11. Balance is, in Susan Wolf 's sense, a non-moral ideal similar to what Wolf calls 'wellroundedness'. See her 'Moral Saints', Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982).
12. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1975), p. 283.
13. I should note thatWilliams's concern seems to be about our subjective sense of living a good life, or our finding our lives worth living. I take it that we are concerned to live lives that are actually good or worth living, but that Williams is right that finding them to be so is a necessary condition. The assumptions I have made about the good life are ones that could be accommodated by either a subjective or an objective conception of the goal in question. If the goal is living a good life, then the assumptions I have made simply specify constituents of the objectively good life. If the goal is taking your life to be good or worth living, then my assumptions are assumptions about what kinds of lives most people tend to find good or worthwhile.
14. The assumption that the good life requires reflection sits nicely with informed or idealized desire accounts of a person's good. For such accounts see James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measure and Moral Importance (Oxford, 1986)
15. Peter Railton, 'Moral Realism', Moral Discourse and Practice, ed. Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton (Oxford and New York, 1997)
16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). It is also compatible with other subjective accounts such as L.W. Sumner's account of welfare in his Welfare, Happiness and Ethics (Oxford, 1996), and with Aristotelian accounts of a person's good such as Rosalind Hursthouse's in her On Virtue Ethics. This assumption will also find agreement among those who defend objective list theories that include autonomy or reflection as one of the objective goods that make up the good life for a person.
17. For example, see Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York, 1993). The first three assumptions about particular components of the good for a person are also compatible with the theories above, although the informed desire accounts of a person's good would take these claims to be contingent on the fact that people desire happiness, friendship and achievement.
18. Hence Rawls's Aristotelian Principle, which tells us that, other things being equal, we will prefer activities of greater complexity, is supported by this same phenomenon. My point is that increasing complexity in a single activity is not always sufficient; we may also need different activities that present new challenges. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 426-7.
19. Claims about the value of a person's ends are open to subjective or objective interpretations. Even a subjective theory of the prudentially good life can allow for some room between the projects one happens to value and the projects that are really worth valuing by claiming that the latter depend on subjective attitudes that are informed, reflective, or otherwise idealized.
20. Perfectionism.
21. I take this last to be, at least in some cases, a non-moral commitment. The distinction between negative and positive commitments, therefore, does not track the distinction between moral and non-moral commitments.
22. So, the same basic value might underlie both negative and positive commitments. I am assuming here that the negative and positive commitments that provide the standards against which we evaluate our lives play a more direct role in our planning and reasoning than do these basic values. I think this is not an unreasonable claim to make about our psychology.
23. Negative commitments, then, may not 'identify' us in the way that positive commitments are likely to do. Victoria Davion makes a persuasive case for the claim that unconditional commitments (such as the moral commitment not to kill innocent people) do not identify us at all, in the sense of defining our individual personalities. I agree with Davion on this point. The point here is that even if we do not take negative commitments to identify us as the individuals we are, such commitments can nevertheless furnish standards we think it is important to meet in our reflective surveys of our lives. See Victoria Davion, 'Integrity and Radical Change', Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence, Kan., 1991).
24. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York, 1964), pp. 96-8.
25. The good done here need not be a moral good. People can take their lives to have meaning in virtue of other kinds of value, for example aesthetic value.
26. There are many ways to skin a cat, but only one way not to skin it. This means that in cases of conflict between one's negative commitments and one's commitments to bringing about an end, there will usually be ways of promoting the end one values in ways that still honour the negative commitment.
27. Hume has a similar view about the ease with which we gain from virtue. See his discussion of the advantages of virtue in the Enquiries, pp. 281-4.
28. For a discussion of the virtue of perspective see my 'Perspective'.
29. Here I am in agreement with one of Susan Wolf's conclusions in 'Moral Saints' that 'our values cannot be fully comprehended on the model of a hierarchical system with morality at the top' (p. 97).
30. Nor is it arbitrary that moral commitments are like this, given the social importance of following rules.
31. Bernard Williams makes a similar point in Ethics and the Limits, pp. 188-9. Williams argues that practical necessity is not identical with moral obligation because people can experience the sense of 'I must' with respect to their non-moral commitments.
32. Of course, it is possible that there will be people whose negative personal commitments cause them to act immorally, but this is not an objection to the current line of argument. We are now considering whether a person with a typical pattern of moral and non-moral commitments would be made worse off, morally speaking, by the prudential virtue of balance. The fact that there are people without this typical pattern to begin with is irrelevant to the claim that balance does not make the usual person worse off.
33. I thank Scott Gelfand for this suggestion.
34. Elizabeth Ashford very helpfully distinguishes these questions in her 'Utilitarianism' with respect to her discussion of utilitarianism's ability to accommodate ground projects.
35. A notable exception to this tendency is Garrett Cullity's 'International Aid and the Scope of Kindness', Ethics 105 (1994).
36. Ashford, 'Utilitarianism', p. 435.
37. In his op-ed piece detailing his experiences interviewing and trying to help Cambodian child prostitutes the journalist Nicholas Kristof reports paying significantly less than this amount for the freedom of two girls ('Loss of Innocence', New York Times, 28 Jan. 2004).
38. 'Utilitarianism', p. 435.
39. For helpful discussion of earlier versions of this article I would like to thank Roger Crisp, J. D. Walker, and the audience at the 28th Annual Conference on Value Inquiry.